


The Horseshow

by objectlesson



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Canon, Incest, M/M, Trauma, early season
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-03
Updated: 2013-01-03
Packaged: 2017-11-23 13:12:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/622518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/objectlesson/pseuds/objectlesson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean’s afraid of flying, and he and his brother are on a plane.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Horseshow

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote the first version of this in high school, and made the mistake of turning it in to my creative writing teacher. It was a bad idea, but this is not a bad story. Everything about this is story is weird...it’s first person, and I’m not quite sure what happens in it. I wrote it a long, long time ago. I still like it, though. I don’t own Supernatural, and this never happened.

We’re in a plane 32,700 feet above the Pacific Ocean. This shouldn’t be a big fucking Federal Case but is is because there are few things that freak Dean out, but flying is one of them. 

He says it’s unnatural. And hell, It kind of is. So many people who don’t know each other  
all sardined into a 747. So many people you’ll never see again, but you might die with. Still, _unnatural_ is a kind of funny, kind of ironic adjective for Dean to use under any circumstances. 

Here, there is a pair of British girls sharing a Heineken, two balding men sweating from cueball heads, and some couple with a baby. These are the folks in our vicinity, the ones who will scream and cry and give us our last rites if this thing comes crashing down.   
My brother’s probably not the only one afraid to fly. There’s usually a few on every plane.

There are only three things I can think of that would make Dean agree to climb in an airplane with me:  
If there was some impossibility preventing us from driving. Christine, Maximum Overdrive. That kind of shit.   
If the Impala was threatened and the only way to save her was to go 32,7000 feet up.   
If I was dying. 

Dean doesn’t give a _shit_ if he’s dying. That he’s dying. 

Luckily, it’s the first two bullet points on the list that have us here. I’m perfectly, (oftentimes infuriatingly) alive, but the Impala’s possessed by some low-grade Hindu spirit-god-demon-whatever the fuck. 

This all went down in West Virginia, and the special urn thing we need to exorcise the bitch into is in LA. None of Bobby’s cars will make it cross country, and the urn’s too fragile to ship, so the plan is to fly to this Hindu temple downtown, summon the demon into the urn, send it back to hell, and hopefully fly back. Provided Dean’s bitching is nothing but bitching, and we don’t die on the way over. 

We watch a single mother in her dowdy mauve sweater yell at her kids, these two red- cheeked little boys. They spill crayons over a coloring book and rub their grubby little palms all over the legs of mom’s high waisted jeans. 

I watch this skinny brunette girl play with her phone, cracking her gum and poking her tongue all over her lips. She’s got tits, the kind of girl Dean’s supposed to notice but rarely does anymore, unless he remembers the guy he’s supposed to be. 

There is a pair of identical twins sitting in front and across from us. Two willow thin brothers, one tapping a long, elegant finger against the window where tendrils of icy filigree have begun to frost the surface. They’re probably somewhere between nine and fourteen. I know that’s a big age range but if you saw these kids you wouldn’t be able to tell, either

The sea surges beneath us and minutes crawl by. Red eye. Espresso. Up all night and maybe if we were going to a family reunion this would be normal, but we’re not and it isn’t, it hasn’t been for a long time. 

My brother sits next to me; he’s tense and afraid with his muscles gathering, twitching and jerking at every hum and drop and I tell him, “Relax. Planes are safer than cars.” 

I’m not a motor head sort of guy, but he definitely is, so he takes offense to this.   
He wants some crown royal, I can tell, but they charge you up the ass on these airplanes. 

He tightens his pathetic nylon seatbelt every few seconds as if it would actually save him if we crashed. 

Stop talking like that, someone says. Another says, I’m from Kansas too, small world!  
Another says, there’s no way. 

All of this shit, out of context. It sounds like one of those Mad Libs games you play in the car during road trips, or some depressing sitcom script. Everything is jumbled. When you take anything out of context, you can make it sound bad. If you’re that type of person. 

Someone says, I’d like a soda, thanks. Another says, this air vent isn’t working.   
Could you pass those headphones?  
She couldn’t have been serious.  
It’s for a wedding  
My son’s graduation  
A funeral.   
We’re all gonna die  
I have nothing to lose. 

I snap out of my head and watch the twins in front of us. Watch their weird, surreal twin interaction, their mimicked gestures, the way they’re more than one person, but not quite two. I know other pairs of twins that aren’t like that, twins who hardly look alike. Who are normal. 

These twins makes me oddly jealous though, and I think of my own brother, Dean’s fear of flying and nothing else. 

How we’re more than one person, not quite two.  
I worry that we’re not even more than one person anymore.

I feel inexplicably dirty that I’m watching these kids, like I’m invading someone’s privacy. That two twin brothers (talking, sipping espresso, touching each other’s arms constantly,) is something I am too profane to watch or witness. 

I am watching them the way a little girl watches a Horseshow. The way an old man watches a Little Girl.

I tear away.  
“Want to play cards?” I ask Dean. He glares. 

“I’ll play whatever you want once we’ve landed, okay? Right now I’d rather not even  
talk to you.”

“You don’t have to be a dick because you’re sacred.”   
He shuts up because he’s not trying to be a dick. 

I come back to the Horseshow; I can’t _not_ and I hate that. Two identical prancing ponies, and most the plane has fallen asleep, except for them.They chatter and giggle under palms and shirts like two little boys at a sleep over. Third grade, which I hardly remember because elementary school was a blur for me, hundreds of towns and hundreds of teachers and I missed days for rocksalt, shotguns, hunting trips. 

I stare and stare at these twins and wonder  
Why does this do this to me why does this

They must know I’m watching, because they’re fucking around now. In the middle of the universe, sort of _kissing_ like they’re not related.  
Horseshowing, showfucking  
Goofing off, getting off and I need to punch my brother in the arm, yell his name and say, “look man, what the hell do they think they’re doing?” But I can’t talk. 

And what would he think?  
And why do I still watch  
And why is my stomach reshaping itself in something other than disgust?

I think it started as a horseshow, and now I’m not so sure. The one next to the window’s mouth is on the other’s neck, telling it some sort of tired, humming secret and I both need to know and fear the intimacy of. 

This shit is so weird, I want to say to Dean. My mouth’s fucking cotton though, cotton and a whole desert. 

Because it started as that, it started as mouths on necks, a joke, a Horseshow, but somehow it’s escalated into one twin brother’s hand searching under the overlarge-tent of the other brother’s shirt, smoothing, searching, wondering. 

I wonder  
I wonder if they’ve ever done this before. Played this game before  
Played the fiddle and now Dean’s watching too. 

He’s silent and stoic about it, which is uncharacteristic for him. Usually he’d have some sort of homophobic jab, some stupid phrase to defend his own masculinity. But he just sits there next to me, terrified and silent, probably because it’s pretty clear they’re twins. Or maybe he’s terrified and silent because we are cramped so closely together. 

It’s unnatural. No one on this plane knows each other. We will never see a single one of them ever again. Not outside the terminal. Not at the horseshows.   
No more family reunions.  
I have nothing to lose.

The twin at the window seat accidentally sees that we are watching, and both of their faces redden to this vivid, sunburn fucking crimson hue that hurts _me_ to look at it’s so bright. 

Nothing to lose. 

I hold up my hands in mock surrender, smile and say “Hey, go for it.”   
And they turn redder still, but they turn back to each other after a second of looking scared. Then they retreat back to their perfect, quiet weird twin world. Maybe they’re pretending it’s the womb they shared or something, I don’t know. But they’re still fooling around, goofing off, getting off. Because by _not reacting_ , I gave two brothers permission to touch each other. I wonder if their parents ever did that, if they got sick of telling them no and just let it happen. Or if these kids are used to being told off. 

Our dad never told us to stop touching. I don’t think he even noticed half the time, after all he had things to kill, demons to exorcize. Dean and I were never normal about that kind of thing, touching or whatever else, but it was because we didn’t _know_ normal. And neither did our dad, not really. So permission to touch, it was always there. 

But now here I sit, with my brother, elbows bumping like sixth graders toes at their first school dance. We have grown up in each other’s rooms, beds, minds, hearts, lives, but now after seeing those two, and their tumbling fumbling rough hands, we act like we’ve   
never seen each other. 

Never met  
Like he’d say:  
Hello how are you  
My name’s Dean and I am afraid of flying  
And my brother has nothing to lose 

There’s this metallic, old penny taste in my mouth but I don’t wonder if I bit through my tongue. I’ve been used to the faintest taste of iron for as long as I can remember. My eyes are stinging though, my heart rabbiting like _I’m_ the one whose afraid of flying, like _I’m_ the one who just got caught show-fucking my brother. 

Fans hum on planes, I think, I don’t know where else that constant low growl could come from. Maybe that’s what people like Dean obsess over and worry about, every little sound and its potential source. I shake my head a little, wondering how anything works when you’re 32,700 feet in the air. 

And what the hell. 

I think the word “suddenly,” but I know it’s been dormant for much longer.  
Otherwise I wouldn’t have put my money down at the Horseshow. 

So I (incorrectly) think “suddenly” and suddenly, I want to climb into Dean’s lap, clamber up onto him and into the fear-air he’s been exhaling and suck _My_ blood out of _His_ veins. 

And after I think it, I realize that I don’t even want _that_ because part of the reason I want _this_ is _because_

If one of us slits our wrists, the other one’s blood will come out. Because we’re brothers. 

And I couldn’t stop watching those twins and their Horseshow not because they were kids, or guys, or kissing. I couldn’t stop watching them because they’re brothers, too. 

Now we sit stiff, forearms brushing occasionally and telling dirty jokes, whispered secrets, the shush shush of tee shirt sleeves yearning for each other. 

We are so high up.   
If we crash this plane, If the cabin depressurizes, two pairs of brothers will fall headlong into the ocean and no one will be left to testify, to bear witness to their sins. Our remains will be charred beyond recognition, and _No one will know what happened here_. 

And everything, our lives and our in and out, day to day eating and shitting and breathing and hunting seems so fucking important right now, but in ten years? In a _year_ when Dean’s dead and I might as well be? Nothing will matter. Nothing will be left but charred remains. 

There is a universe unspoken between us, and not just now. It’s been there for as long as we realized what normal was. My mind races and I think of so many unreal things, but the one that keeps on coming back is the question,   
If you fuck, what will change?

What will be different if blood touches blood in _that way_ ; it’ll surely be less intimate than what’s been happening for years. What’s happening now. 

Than the way you touch already

What’s with you two? And if the cabin depressurizes?   
If the plane crashes? Then so? So what? so what if

I have nothing left to lose is what I keep telling myself, but that’s only an in vain attempt at lessening the pain that will be my entire existence when I lose the one thing _do have_. 

Dean. and I know in ten thousand different ways that _this_...touching, kissing, showfucking, realfucking..that won’t be what loses him. Not with hell hounds exactly eight months and twenty four days away. 

And why the hell are you flying, Sam, when you could _die_ doing it and you haven’t fucked your brother yet? I ask myself this and have no good answer, so

I turn to Dean and say, “why not? Why…” And I don’t know what I mean to say. Why haven’t we crossed that line yet, if we’ve crossed every other? 

If you’re going to hell, Dean, why don’t you go for fucking me, for loving me, just as much as you’re going for _dying_ , and _killing_ for me? Which is worse, honor or love? It seems easy when I put it this way. Still, I sputter, “You and me, Dean, but we...” I clear my throat. “Why hasn’t it...”

“Happened yet?” he answers in a low voice. His eyes are too clear for a moment, not the green of emeralds or grass or absinthe or any of the other green things you’re supposed to compare eyes to, but the green of sky, or water. Too bright and sagey to be anywhere farther away from blue. They’re blown open, so fucking _clear_ and I think that we probably waited too long. We’ve been showfucking to each other for so long without realfucking that it is going to be like an avalanche when it happens. A fucking flood. A Plane Crash. 

And someone blows a hole in the siding of this thing, aluminum and fiberglass and iron. The air outside is rushing in in huge, freezing cold gusts and the cabin depressurizes, and the Horseshow is over because no one’s watching, they’re too busy screaming and crying and begging for last rites. 

An echo somewhere tells me, you waited too long, and now look what happened. The plane crashed, and you have eight months and twenty four days. 

That’s not nearly a long enough time to spend with the one that you love. And I look away from Dean’s burning sage sky-eyes, turn away from my brother and try to re-convince myself that I have nothing to lose.


End file.
